There is little doubt that a religious belief imparting a sense of law and order and helping to control the relationships between human populations and the other components of their environment, is highly developed among present-day hunter/gatherers. Such beliefs not only help to provide a feeling of unity stretching far beyond the hunting band itself, but they afford an ordered interconnexion between the foragers and the spiritual processes which are looked upon as all-powerful forces influencing life and death (Turnbull, 1968, 25). This is well exemplified in the case of the Musahar, a Dravidian tribe of hunter/gatherers who inhabit the jungle regions of the Eastern Vindhyas in Central India. According to Nesfield, quoted by Crooke (1896, Vol. IV:34), ‘The great active power in the universe … is Bansapatti, Bansatti or Bansuri, the goddess who … personifies and presides over the forests. By her command the trees bear fruit, the bulbs grow in the earth, the bees make honey, the tussar worm fattens on the asân leaf, and lizards, wolves and jackals (useful food to man) multiply their kind. She is a goddess of childbirth. To her the childless wife makes prayers for the grant of offspring. In her name and by her aid the medicine man or sorcerer expels devils from the bodies of the possessed. In her name and to her honour the village man kindles a new fire for lighting a brick kiln. Woe to the man who takes a false oath in the name of Bansatti.’

Very soon after the ice withdrew from the higher levels of the Scandinavian Peninsula the vegetation invaded. Even up to at least 1,100–1,20 m above sea-level the pine forest was in existence about 8,500 years ago (Barth et al., 1980).

Radiocarbon datings from human sites in the high mountains of southern Norway also go back 8,500 years BP (Moe et al., 1978, Bang-Andersen & Kjos-Hanssen, 1979). It seems probable that the reindeer has been ‘the only possible resource that can explain man's presence in the highlands during the Early Mesolithic’ (Moe et al., 1978). There is little doubt that for groups of people in the Norwegian mountains, reindeer was the most important food during thousands of years (Barth 1981a).